Posts Tagged ‘delivery’

In my last post I spoke about the importance of managing customers’ expectations and I think that it was key to having such a successful year.

One of my philosophies is ‘always to be honest to customers’. There is no point promising a 3 week delivery, when we know that it is going to take 4 or even 5. All it does is cause problems for everyone. Although our load cells can be a small part of a larger system, they are often “mission critical”. This means that misleading our customers on delivery dates can cause the engineers serious problems. It also means we would spend more time answering calls from irate buyers and customers demanding to know when their load cells were going to be delivered, than we would manufacturing the products that have been ordered.

It is worth bearing in mind, if you go out and get 3 quotes, 2 manufacturers give you a 6 week manufacturing and delivery time and one gives you 4 weeks, the chances are you won’t get it in 4!

That said, of course we will bend over backwards to help accommodate all our customers’ needs and, in fact, that is one of the reasons that we have expanded our factory to enable us to stock our most popular products for same or next day dispatch.

So, don’t be left waiting for your products. When we give a delivery date, we’ll stick to it!

I know this is a very difficult question to answer, but it is one I often find myself discussing both internally with people here at LCM Systems, my marketing people and friends down at the Golf Club. What makes people decide to buy? And in this case, I am talking about technical and engineering products.

Sometimes it’s obvious, the company you buy from is the only one that offers the exact product for your precise application. We often find this when engineers approach us for sophisticated and complex weighing systems, our design engineers are the only ones who truly understand what is required from the load cells and how they can seamlessly integrated to solve their application conundrums.

But what else drives people’s buying decisions? Of course, a product that is used in critical applications, particularly those with heath and safety implications need to be of the highest possible quality, otherwise lives could be at risk. I’ve written about this in a previous blog on LCM Systems’ Shackle load cells.

What about some of the intangibles? Is it important to you that our products are manufactured in the UK? Is delivery a key factor? What about price, is that the be all and end all of your search for load cells? With our internet sales growing year on year, I suppose it is also easy to forget that some people find that having a knowledgeable, helpful and friendly voice at the end of a phone to guide them through their buying decision is a major factor in deciding what company they buy from.

I’d love to hear from you. What is your Top 5 list of what influences your buying decision with respect to your engineering components? And most importantly, if you buy from LCM Systems, how do we rate?